Bleszinski, who left Gears of War maker Epic games last October to take a break from game development, writes on his personal Tumblr that he thinks the time when most devices require a consistent Internet connection is coming sooner than later. "My gut is telling me that an always online future is probably coming," he wrote. "It’s coming fast, and possibly to the majority of the devices you enjoy."

While some gamers are still loudly complaining about the required server connections in PC games like SimCity and Diablo 3, Bleszinski notes that the former game is "selling briskly," and the latter has moved over 12 million units. "I would bet money that without the always online elements of Diablo 3 that it would have sold half of that," Bleszinski wrote, pointing an implicit finger at software piracy as the main reason for always-online requirements.

What about situations where people might want to play a game or console in some remote location without reliable high-speed Internet? Bleszinski replies that such situations are "the edge case... the week-long vacation to the cabin is only 30 hours of not playing a game or a device that’s built for much more. Technology doesn’t advance by worrying about the edge case." (Emphasis in original.)

He also pointed out that Microsoft's decision not to support dial-up connections on the original Xbox 360 was seen as a "bold move" in 2005, but that technology quickly caught up to the company's decision. "Well behaved people rarely make history. Deal with it," he summed up.

As far as Orth's departure from Microsoft, Bleszinski noted that we'll never know what really happened behind the scenes, but he still decried the Internet mob mentality that developed around Orth's statements. "If I departed from Epic every time I said something dumb I wouldn’t have made it the last 10 years there."

The problem is implementing it NOW, when the large percentage of consumers, let alone people who would acquire these devices, likely doesn't have the kind of network to support such a system.

Certainly throwing things out there to stress the infrastructure gives the ISPs reasons to want to expand or upgrade their network, but this isn't the kind of reason to do so. The widening adoption of services like Netflix is what's doing it.

328 Reader Comments

An edge case is an extreme, not common, case that you STILL must account for. Broadband adoption is 60%ish in the US. So:

1. People without an always on internet connection are not an edge case.2. Even if they were, good engineering practice is to account for it if at all possible.

MS is out of their minds if they think this will go well.

I keep seeing the broadband adoption rate trotted out as an argument against always-online requirements for games and consoles, but there's a huge hole in it that proponents ignore. The more appropriate statistic would be the number of gamers/console owners who've adopted broadband. Nobody gives a rip about grandma in her trailer with dialup when it comes to always-online gaming.

Per Microsoft, 27% of existing 360 users do not have a broadband connection.

By broadband connection, they mean those people aren't paying them for xbox live.

An edge case is an extreme, not common, case that you STILL must account for. Broadband adoption is 60%ish in the US. So:

1. People without an always on internet connection are not an edge case.2. Even if they were, good engineering practice is to account for it if at all possible.

MS is out of their minds if they think this will go well.

Of the 40% that doesn't have a broadband connection and can afford the new xbox is the edge case. Which I imagine is a very small fraction of that 40%.

EDIT: Voted down for pointing out there are poor people in this adoption case... sheesh.

Upvoted for facts

The numbers are somewhere over 80% for xbox users who have their xbox connected to highspeed internet. I would find it hard to believe they would give up an initial 20% of their users given the arms race w/ Sony though...

I agree, it's going to be interesting none the less, I can hear the outcry now. Once people move past the fact that the new xbox *may* always be online, they will move right on to a new argument that MS is demanding users have an always online connection, but then continue to charge them for xbox live.

An edge case is an extreme, not common, case that you STILL must account for. Broadband adoption is 60%ish in the US. So:

1. People without an always on internet connection are not an edge case.2. Even if they were, good engineering practice is to account for it if at all possible.

MS is out of their minds if they think this will go well.

I keep seeing the broadband adoption rate trotted out as an argument against always-online requirements for games and consoles, but there's a huge hole in it that proponents ignore. The more appropriate statistic would be the number of gamers/console owners who've adopted broadband. Nobody gives a rip about grandma in her trailer with dialup when it comes to always-online gaming.

What about the many MANY users that want to play console games but don't want to play multiplayer at all? People act like you have to have an internet connection of some kind to own a console. Simply not true.

An edge case is an extreme, not common, case that you STILL must account for. Broadband adoption is 60%ish in the US. So:

1. People without an always on internet connection are not an edge case.2. Even if they were, good engineering practice is to account for it if at all possible.

MS is out of their minds if they think this will go well.

I keep seeing the broadband adoption rate trotted out as an argument against always-online requirements for games and consoles, but there's a huge hole in it that proponents ignore. The more appropriate statistic would be the number of gamers/console owners who've adopted broadband. Nobody gives a rip about grandma in her trailer with dialup when it comes to always-online gaming.

No, the more appropriate statistic would be the number of gamers/console owners who have access to broadband.

To a point. The purpose of business is to create customers, not just hold onto ones you already have. Ignoring potential new ones, in a world where consumer technology is increasingly available (and moreso than infrastructure) doesn't seem like a great a way to accomplish this. Dismiss grandma all you want, but the current console generation is the first one my parents, grandparents themselves, bought a system for their use.

One thing to keep in mind is that these companies looking at always-online think in terms that are longer than the current, or event next product release cycle. You look 10-20 years out at what the market conditions will be like, and you position your product and service development accordingly.

I'm against always online because I look 10-20 years out. I want to play a game in 10 years on the 720, which is no longer supported. The servers have been taken down, console and all the games I bought are dead. This is not a hypothetical to me. I'm currently playing a 12 year old game, and I have ones much older than that installed.

Exactly - I don't like the "Always Online" idea, but needing to be online to play now isn't what bothers me the most. What bothers me is what happens when their server goes down (have we already forgotten the PlayStation Network outage?) or gets retired. My son just started playing Excite Truck on the Wii last week - that game came out 7 years ago and would probably not be supported if this kind of requirement was around back then. I want what I buy to work for as long as I keep and maintain it, not for as long as the company I bought it from decides they want it to work.

Implementations are going to vary, of course, but for anti-piracy purposes the amount of bandwidth required to periodically ("Always on" is something of a misnomer) call back to the mothership with an encrypted "I am legitimate" token is miniscule. A 300 baud dial-up connection from 1984 with your handset in an acoustic coupler would have more than adequate bandwidth to deal with that without slowing down your BBS browsing and ASCII porn. And, yes, obviously they will build in re-trys and other such mechanisms such that your game does not blow up just because your ISP drops the ball for a few minutes. They are not going to block on it (interrupt your game) so latency is a non-issue.

I don't have much of an opinion philosophically, but on a technical level there is no need for all this gnashing of teeth over broadband and ISP reliability.

An edge case is an extreme, not common, case that you STILL must account for. Broadband adoption is 60%ish in the US. So:

1. People without an always on internet connection are not an edge case.2. Even if they were, good engineering practice is to account for it if at all possible.

MS is out of their minds if they think this will go well.

I keep seeing this quoted, but broadband adoption isn't the statistic we should be looking at. The real question is what is the percent of households that want broadband... but don't have access to it.

Looking at the total adoption rate of the internet in general, plenty of states are still at 60-70%

This is from 2011 but I thought was interesting. http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012 ... x?view=allLook at the Broadband & Dialup 2000-2011 chart. It seems from that graph that most people who want internet access... do in fact have broadband, although it might not be the greatest. There only exists a very small gap between broadband and dialup.

There is still a fairly large amount of people who simply don't have computers or internet access even in 2013, but the largest reason seems to price and apathy. I think we're forgetting that plenty of people simply don't care about broadband or computers in general, and its a sizable portion of the population.

If he's trying to sell "always online" is a feature of the future, there needs to be some benefit for the customer. So what is it?

It is attached to the latest and greatest must have game of the week; that's the feature.

Seriously, who has to sell the crap the AAA companies put out anymore? People will flock to buy the latest game regardless of how much crap the companies throw at them and are happy to do so. So long as this is the case, and it will be for a very long time, there will only be an erosion of what you can do with the things you buy.

Now, back to my PC and all of the lovely GOGs I can eat. Seriously, Quake is still one of the top five best FPS games ever even without all of the nice upgrades people have hacked out.

WARNING : The last 30 seconds is almost guaranteed to cause unbridaled envy.

We don't want always on. We're not always on. If anything a lot of people would like the option to be "off" and have it left up to them. I understand there will probably be a group of people who find this acceptable but I think they're severely underestimating backlash/resistance to this and how it may change attitudes towards gaming.

I'm always surprised how people in the industry could be so clueless about their market. I'm even more shocked when they refer to a huge chunk of the client base as thieves.

I can somewhat get my head around the fact other industries do it, but games are supposed to be products made by people who love games. For gamers, by gamers and all that jazz.

When I read statements like the one in this story, I want to ask the person being quoted 'what happened to you? Who hurt you?'

Well to be fair he did point out the huge sales for both Diablo 3 and SimCity despite all the complaints. So in a way he does know his market, people who complain about stuff but still give the person they are complaining about their money. People rather complain than do without, that's why we have EA, Activision, etc. releasing mediocre products and yearly rehashes. If something sucks I don't buy it. Simple really.

Forget this guy. The only game I've actually liked of his was Jazz Jackrabbit. After that, it seems he lost sight of what's in the best interest of the consumer, and has become the Michael Bay of video game design.

Well Cliffy B I haven't played one of your awful games since being thoroughly disappointed by my purchase (yes, purchase, not pirate) of the new incarnation Alice (shame on you for that release, btw), so I think it's safe to say I won't be playing your DRM crap. All I care about is my massive pool of kickstarters, all of which will be beautifully DRM free. I've paid, at most, $250 for a kickstarter game, when was the last time anyone spent $250 on a Cliffy B game?

Edit: I'm an idiot, I still stand by not liking Cliffy B. games, but Alice was an American McGee game. We regret the error.

While it's true that I'm an 'always online' household, that means my console in fact cannot rely on being 'always online' since it has to compete with 3 iPhones, two iPads, 4 PCs, a Wii U, a Palm Pre, and my phone service all riding on the same wire.

Meaning that at any given moment a YouTube channel, a phone call or FaceTime, three copies of Minecraft, email/notifications/alerts, and searching the web for a Wiki article can occur at the same time that a game is being played on the Wii U (and it isn't unlikely that the Wiki article + YouTube video is directly related to the game on the screen).

If your pipe can't handle all those connections, it's time to get a bigger pipe. I don't see why a typical broadband connection wouldn't be able to handle what you describe.

It won't... At least Comcast won't. And I had their mid-tier service.

Even with QoS enabled on all my routers, I had major lag problems on my PS3 and 360 whenever Netflix was in use elsewhere in the house... When I later got DropCams installed, things got really bad. I started getting dropped packets. I got so many dropped packets, that unless I turned off a bunch of stuff, I had to resort to using my LTE hotspot to upload pictures and stuff to social networks. (And I know it's not my equipment, because I architect/design network connected SW/HW for a living)

It wasn't my wiring or my cable signal quality, as their contractor noted that I had a very clean signal, with one of the best signal to noise ratios he's seen in a residential area. And according to my logs, I wasn't consuming that much bandwidth at any given moment. It seemed Comcast is able to handle bursty traffic, but not sustained traffic.

Anyways, after I switched to FiOS my problems went away... And to further support that it wasn't me... My coworker, who was also on Comcast, had the same problems, when he started installing Always-Connected network devices (cameras and such) on his network. He had the same problem I did... As soon as he went always-connected, his network throughput fell off a cliff, as he got constant dropped packets. He also switched to FiOS to remedy his problems...

The issue? I only was able to get FiOS about a year ago. He was only able to get it months ago. Several of our friends are unable to get it still. So while a great many people can probably get Cable, in my experience, cable internet sucks for always-connected from a reliability standpoint.

Always-online requirement just adds more points of failure, while making it more inconvenient for the player and adding nothing of benefit. Why would consumers want that? These industry fools need to realize there's much more to it than broadband availability.

It's the annoyance of needing to connect a game machine to your internet when it does not actually need it. The computer sits near the broadband router, connected by ethernet. The console sits at the opposite end of my home, far away from it.

It's being booted out of your single-player game and losing your progress because your ISP had a five-minute hiccup. The sort of thing most people never notice and does not matter for the 90% of the time when not playing multiplayer. An always-online console makes that minuscule hiccup a major problem 100% of the time.

It's the company that took your $60 for the game having servers go down on launch day, down for maintenance windows, or just plain fail for some reason. Rarely ever do companies compensate gamers when they fail at their end of the always-online requirement.

It's coming back to a game you bought years (or even console generations) ago and it not working. Not because the media is busted or your console is dead, but because the company decided "we have your money, we don't care about continuing to support your game." They decided it would need that support - they should not get away with refusing to provide it.

All of these downsides have absolutely nothing to do with what % of the population has broadband available. None of them add anything gamers want. And none of them are necessary when not playing online multiplayer. Consoles are supposed to be simple: turn on, insert game, play. The more your throw that away, the less reason to buy one.

We have alternatives, game publishers and designers. PCs, smartphones, tablets, and non-gaming options. You are NOT irreplaceable.

An edge case is an extreme, not common, case that you STILL must account for. Broadband adoption is 60%ish in the US. So:

1. People without an always on internet connection are not an edge case.2. Even if they were, good engineering practice is to account for it if at all possible.

MS is out of their minds if they think this will go well.

Not to mention service members, etc.

Exactly. My son's Boy Scout troop toured a nuclear sub and our guide proudly showed how he'd rigged his Xbox to an LCD monitor suspended above his bunk, so he could lay there and play. He'd run an ethernet wire across the sub to another sailor who also had an Xbox so they could play together, no other network needed. So now Microsoft is going to screw those guys? Why not, they're only two lost customers, right? Them and the hundreds of Boy Scouts they'll be showing their new PS4s.

I'd rather not pay for a game and be required to get permission from the manufacturer every time I want to play it. And this is exactly what this feels like. "Hey Microsoft, can I play the game I paid $60 for?"

Of the 40% that doesn't have a broadband connection and can afford the new xbox is the edge case. Which I imagine is a very small fraction of that 40%.

You've missed it. It's not that 40% can't afford a broadband connection, it's that they can't get a broadband connection even if they wanted it -- like me.

I didn't miss it, you are the edge case, you are of that small fraction that doesn't have broadband but can afford the new xbox. I spoke specifically to that point as being the edge case. The other's who have access to broadband and can't afford more than likely can not afford the console, thus they are not the edge case.

You missed, twice now, those that can AFFORD both but DO NOT HAVE THE TOPTION of broadband. Example: were I to still live with my parents in the rural NW, where geographic restrictions have prevented new line installation and trees prevent a satellite connection, I'd be screwed by this.

OptimusWang wrote:

I'm calling bs on that number. There's too much latency for twitch gaming, but satellite ISPs are by definition broadband. You can't shoot your buddies in Halo, but things like Netflix work just fine.

e: lulz at the downvotes for pointing out bad data instead of joining the lynch mob

in a discussion about gaming, you point out that gaming doesn't work but that's OK because streaming movies does work fine. how does that support your point?

zoomwsu wrote:

Way too many assumptions in your comment about what will actually happen in an always-online world. I think you're improperly mixing today's paradigm with that of tomorrow. Who's to say the 720 game in 10 years won't be supported/servers won't exist? Who's to say all of your games will be dead?

The past, and the common sense financial decisions that these companies will be forced to make. In 10 years, they will be making no money continuing to run the servers for games they sold 10 years ago and they will absolutely, inevitably, shut them down.

In your example was he treating customers wrong? Would ignoring the problem have saved his business?

Sorry I wasn't clear; I wasn't trying to combine the two issues. I'm sure he gave excellent service, and I'm positive that the piracy that did occur was not due to some imagined slight towards the pirates.

I was trying to make two points:

1) Piracy has a *measurable* affect on sales, despite pirates telling themselves it doesn't. That article was just the first that I was able to pull up that had concrete numbers.

2) For a lot of smaller shareware authors (or indie game devs), it isn't worth the stress and implementation time to chase after those lost sales, because that time is better spent elsewhere. The blog post's author is still in business and saying largely the same thing, so it must be working for him: https://wincent.com/blog/on-piracy

That said, a major portion of a game's sales occur in the first month after release, and I think it probably is worth the time of EA, Ubisoft, or Microsoft to try to prevent piracy during that month. Maximizing profits requires balancing the ratio between legitimate users inconvenienced by the DRM vs pirates who purchase it because of the DRM, and EA has been in business long enough that I'm sure they have evidence that some form of DRM is better than none.

The more I hear from these self-obsessed jackwads, the more I believe the games industry needs an enema. A really big one, like '83.

It's coming, I can feel it. The race to the bottom will get them. Care for a game of League of Legends?

Funny. LoL mandates an internet connection...

But LoL is an online multiplayer game - one that is free to play too. (You can buy stuff but none of that is required to play; I know as I've been playing it since the beta.) That's a perfect example of a game that does justify being always-connected.

I live in NYC. I have 20mbps down. My ISP, while mostly good, is unreliable at times. In January, I went a week without internet for who knows what reason. My point is that sometimes internet goes out, even in highly urban areas, and it's immensely frustrating if my game console locks itself down because I don't have internet. I didn't pirate anything, I didn't choose to live in "why on Earth would I live there?"-ville, and I get locked out? No thanks.

Intentionally breaking functionality of something due to lacking a connection it does not actually require is not "advancing" anything.

It's bullshit.

While it would be true to say that "bullshit does not advance by worrying about the edge case," most humans who aren't assholes don't really concern themselves with how to advance bullshit. We can leave the advancement of bullshit to people like the guy in that picture.

On a related note: for the publishers who really want to plant their flag on this, I don't want to hear any of you bitching about "lost sales" or whatever else when our chosen way of dealing with it is to spend our money elsewhere.

On the contrary - EDGE CASES are what technology is all about. Before someone invents a new, better, cooler way of doing something, everyone chugs along with the status quo and most people can't imagine doing it differently. Every single piece of technology we depend on everyday used to be an "edge case." Space flight, prosthetics, cell phones...

To be more specific, he should have said "_trailing_ edge cases." Luddites, farmers, people, grannies, "the market we don't care about" or some other derogatory term probably would have suited better.... /s

I have a few issues with this. First, always online is coming. I don't debate that fact. BUT, our infrastructure cannot currently support that functionality. While he might have a point for a weekend getaway without your console, he's completely missing the point of the issue where there are still a lot of areas in the country that do not have access to high-speed internet.

The second issue I have is with the whole Diablo 3 wouldn't have sold half of the 12 million if it wasn't always online. Diablo 3 sold 12 million DESPITE it being always online. Blizzard is know for quality games, which is why there were millions of pre-orders for the game. That's a large number of the currently sold amount right there.

I bought Diablo 3, and I played it for about 2 weeks. I haven't picked it back up since I died in a single player game DUE TO LAG. How is that fair? I have a constant internet connection and if Microsoft's console is always on, I'm out.

I play a lot of MMOs and multiplayer games, with the rare exception being not online/single player. True that doesn't fit for everyone, but even I live out in the backwoods and have broadband.. Also always connected doesn't always require broadband.

An edge case is an extreme, not common, case that you STILL must account for. Broadband adoption is 60%ish in the US. So:

1. People without an always on internet connection are not an edge case.2. Even if they were, good engineering practice is to account for it if at all possible.

MS is out of their minds if they think this will go well.

Of the 40% that doesn't have a broadband connection and can afford the new xbox is the edge case. Which I imagine is a very small fraction of that 40%.

You've missed it. It's not that 40% can't afford a broadband connection, it's that they can't get a broadband connection even if they wanted it -- like me.

I didn't miss it, you are the edge case, you are of that small fraction that doesn't have broadband but can afford the new xbox. I spoke specifically to that point as being the edge case. The other's who have access to broadband and can't afford more than likely can not afford the console, thus they are not the edge case.

There are plenty of people who live in rurals areas who don't have access to broadband. Most of them could afford a console.

In shareware circles stores like that are fairly common, and to keep our sanity we generally just need to ignore the pirates as best we can and treat our customers well. If you honestly think that piracy *doesn't* hurt sales you're fooling yourself. And no, gamers won't always just go off and pirate other games; advertising creates desire in pirates just as well as anyone else, and some portion of those people would buy the game if they can't get it any other way.

Is it possible that just as many will buy the software because they pirated it and tried it out first?

I will absolutely get behind always online in cases where there's a reason for it; you know, like MMORPGs and other games that are supposed to be played online. But for anything that doesn't actually require an internet connection, forcing us online is not an issue of whether people have the internet, it's an issue of whether we're being forced into something that nobody either wants or needs.

I don't mind supplementary online stuff, like DLC news etc., worldwide game-stats etc., but if it's supposed to be a single-player game then unless I can play it actually on my own then it it won't be causing me to part with any money.

So games companies if you want me to be online when I don't have to be, my counter-offer is simple; I'll play the pirated copy that has the features I actually want, and pay nothing for the privilege. How's that for anti-piracy in action?

An edge case is an extreme, not common, case that you STILL must account for. Broadband adoption is 60%ish in the US. So:

1. People without an always on internet connection are not an edge case.2. Even if they were, good engineering practice is to account for it if at all possible.

MS is out of their minds if they think this will go well.

Of the 40% that doesn't have a broadband connection and can afford the new xbox is the edge case. Which I imagine is a very small fraction of that 40%.

You've missed it. It's not that 40% can't afford a broadband connection, it's that they can't get a broadband connection even if they wanted it -- like me.

I didn't miss it, you are the edge case, you are of that small fraction that doesn't have broadband but can afford the new xbox. I spoke specifically to that point as being the edge case. The other's who have access to broadband and can't afford more than likely can not afford the console, thus they are not the edge case.

There are plenty of people who live in rurals areas who don't have access to broadband. Most of them could afford a console.

But they don't have time for gaming. They have to wake up at 5 am to plow the field, feed the animals, milk the cows, collect the eggs and other rural chores. At night, there's prayer, dinner, procreating and early sleeping to wake up at 5 am. Sunday there's church and American Football. /s

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area.